This week is Eurovision week. Now encompassing an astonishing 43 countries, the 53rd Eurovision song contest, held this year in Belgrade, features two semi-finals on Tuesday and Thursday before the final on Saturday.

The standard way of watching Eurovision in the UK is to treat it as a fiesta of "so bad it's good" TV in which naive continentals demonstrate their charming misunderstandings of the Anglo-American popular music idiom. That will certainly be Terry Wogan's take in his commentary. Increasingly though, I've been thinking that the joke has got old and that British superiority in Eurovision has become a symptom of a worrying smugness and insularity.

Eurovision has always thrown up the occasional pop classic - no one quibbles over Abba's victory with Waterloo in 1974 - but for many years entries tended towards the mediocre. There's still a lot of dross of course, but since the mid-90s Eurovision has become much more interesting. When the former eastern bloc countries began to enter the contest, they entered their top creative talents. Not only that, it also became clear that their take on pop music, as well as that of some of the other European states, was often much more interesting than anything the traditional forces in Eurovision could come up with. Take Ruslana, a Ukranian superstar who won in 2004 with Wild Dances, an inspiringly over-the-top frenzy of westernised Carpathian folk music.

The countries of "old Europe" have come to do conspicuously badly in Eurovision. Ireland, which had four wins between 1992 and 1996, reached a nadir last year by coming 24th in the semi-final. The UK has only managed two top-three finishes since last winning in 1997, even getting zero points in 2003 with the woeful Jemini. Of course, some of this is to do with bloc voting, which gives an inbuilt advantage to neighbouring countries with overlapping ethnic and national groups, as in the former Yugoslavia and parts of eastern Europe. But a large part of the UK's slump (and Ireland's too) is a result of the mediocrity of their entries.

In the past, the UK has succeeded in Eurovision with unknowns (such as Bucks Fizz in 1981) or mid-level artists (such as Katrina and the Waves in 1997). Few British stars have entered Eurovision since Cliff Richard in 1968, who came second (apparently pipped at the post due to Spanish bribery). In the last few years Britain has entered Z-list singers and total unknowns with a succession of pitifully dull entries enlivened by the occasional weak novelty. This year, Ireland has petulantly entered Dustin the Singing Turkey in a "hilarious" protest against the former Eurovision superpower's fall from grace.

The UK and Ireland's attitudes to Eurovision - once genial, good-natured mockery - now look increasingly petulant, like deliberate self-sabotage. The assumption that the UK should conquer all despite entering non-songs by nonentities, is revealing of an unpleasant and anachronistic sense of superiority over Europe. It is assumed that the Britain has everything to offer musically and culturally and nowhere other than the US has anything much to offer back.

It's certainly true that the UK has a massively vibrant and productive musical scene, but then so do other European countries. It may have taken a while for the rest of Europe to develop indigenous music scenes that were as diverse and distinctive as Britain's, but today we are increasingly no more than just another country music-wise.

Perhaps the very idea of a Eurovision song contest is absurd. Perhaps entering Eurovision shouldn't be the top priority for British musicians. But the wider lesson the contest has is that we can no longer assume that Europeans will take notice of and respect Britain without an effort to communicate and engage with the rest of Europe.